A migrating Prairie Warbler is emblematic of millions of birds that are migrating north each night this May (photo by Stan Galick). A screenshot of a BirdCast Bird Migration Forecast map for overnight May 10th (tonight).

Migration Dashboard provides a nightly report on bird migration, including summaries of radar-based measurements of nocturnal bird migration over your local county, your state, and across the entire Lower 48 States for the contiguous United States. The variety of interesting information provided includes estimates of the total number of birds migrating as well as their flight directions, speeds, and altitudes. You can watch migration patterns in near real time or see a summary for a given night the following day. Dashboard even provides a list of birds expected to be migrating through your area.

The Migration Dashboard is a product of BirdCast, which is created by researchers from 3 organizations – the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Colorado State University, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst – with a growing list of other collaborators, supporters, and partners that includes the US Geological Survey, NASA, and more.

You can review the current Migration Dashboard for local bird migration over your county, your state, and across the Lower 48 States at Migration Dashboard - BirdCast Just type in your county or state in the white box at the top of the page.

But that’s not all, you can view Bird Migration Forecast maps for the next 3 nights at Bird migration forecast maps - BirdCast We have had weather forecasts for decades, now we have bird migration forecasts! The forecasts are produced from models using the last 23 years of bird movements in the atmosphere detected by the US NEXRAD weather surveillance radar network.

You can also get migration forecasts for the next 3 nights for your specific town or city, or the town nearest your position anywhere in the Lower 48 States. You can access Local Bird Migration Alerts at Local bird migration alerts - BirdCast Just type in the name of your city, or a nearby town, and you will get a simple bird migration forecast for the next 3 nights.

Favorites among many birders are the animated Live Bird Migration Maps at Live bird migration maps - BirdCast Just click on the white arrow in the bottom left side of the map to see the action. You can also access maps from previous nights by changing the date at the top of the map. These maps are real gems for people interested in learning more about bird migration as they provide real-time analysis showing intensities of color-coded radar movements throughout the nighttime hours as detected by the US weather surveillance radar network from sunset to sunrise across the Lower 48 States.

With all these high-tech instruments available for every birder, we are all becoming better birders, making the best use of our time in the field, and planning our field trips in advance to take advantage of big overnight migrations – and we are having fun tracking the advance of birds migrating across America.